


The Context of Infinity is This:

by faedemon



Category: 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future - Jon Bois
Genre: Essays, Existentialism, Gen, Meta, Worldbuilding, among other things, and a pondering of what immortality could mean, and what that means for the people who have to live with it, in conjunction with time, it's a dive into the existential fears that come with it, this is an introspective piece on the nature of immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-11-28 17:31:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20970359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faedemon/pseuds/faedemon
Summary: Samuel Wetherton, attending college for the seventeenth time, takes an essay writing class, and is prompted to discuss the nature of immortality. As he writes, his ideas get away from him. A tricky subject, immortality.An introspective piece looking at the future of humanity as depicted in 17776 from the perspective of humanity.





	The Context of Infinity is This:

**Author's Note:**

> This work is cross-posted on FFN under the username faedemonn, and can be found [here](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13574515/1/the-context-of-infinity-is-this).

Samuel Wetherton  
10-9-17776  
Ms. Alturo  
Essay Writing Seminar

The Context of Infinity

The thing about immortality is that we have all always known what it meant. We were there for its beginning, and we were there to watch as innovation and technological revolution thrust forward and fell back. We watched New York City sink in real time. We figured out how to move forward with this new, unimaginable context for our lives: time will never run out.

Humanity, and life, and living was _defined_ by time running out when we were children. We all had to move so, so fast—we had to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives, figure out where we wanted to go to school, figure out how to get where we want to be and feel fulfilled before the clock stopped ticking. It was exhausting, but it was life, and being without that pressure of the clock shook the world, in the beginning. We now have unquantifiable amounts of time to figure things out, and to do what we want to do, and we know how to deal with that _now_, but in the beginning, it was up to us to figure it out. 

At first it was, understandably, an excuse to procrastinate. To put off the things we care about or the things we don’t, just because there is an infinity of time to get it done. And we all did. We refused to turn in homework, and we refused to do the dishes, and we refused to take out the trash. We didn’t write that novel or audition for that part, because we’d do it _eventually_. And it was thrilling, for a time, to be able to slack off so completely.

But after a while we figured it out, you know? Procrastination, slacking off, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t help you, and it’s not fun, and there is no benefit and there is no point. You are just putting things off for the sake of lying on the couch a moment longer, and there is _no point_.

We all learned that, inevitably enough. Eventually, as time dragged on, we learned that when you want to do something, you just do it, and if you need to do something, you get it done then and there. Procrastination’s function died when we stopped dying, funnily enough, because procrastination is a product of there being time to waste. There was still a due date, which would force you to complete the task eventually. Now that we’re here forever, there is no due date, and there is no incentive to get off your ass. We had to become our own incentive.

The thing about immortality is that we fought and tore at the transition from time running out to time stretching on. We had to re-learn the context of the clock. What was once a countdown became a memoir, and we did it the hard way. The thing about immortality is that we all know exactly what it means, because we lived in a time where we didn’t.

Children are no longer born, and that means that there will never, in all our eternity, be someone who grows up from infancy without the pressure of the clock. There will be no child who does not have to face the unbearable fear of being stuck in a position they don’t want. There will be no child introduced to a world that figured its shit out already, and there will be no child who doesn’t remember, however distantly, what hate and fear and war was like.

I wonder if that’s a good thing.

When I was younger I think I would have wished such a childhood for myself; when that pressure of the clock still mattered to me, when I still felt like my youth was wasted worrying. But now that I have lived over fifteen thousand years, I know that having that brief, brief understanding of time as part of a race destined to die was invaluable. Had I not known the pressure of the clock I never would have understood the relief it is to be free of its weight, or the weight that comes with that relief, and I think perhaps we as a race never would have fully understood how to keep going. Humanity born into a timeless world would be aimless, without goal, without contentment. We who lived in an impermanent world can acknowledge the beauty of permanence.

But that is just conjecture. The thing about immortality is that it comes at the price of birth, too, and we’re never going to know how a child born with the clock stopped might turn out. If there’s point in wondering, I cannot know. This is another one of those things you do because you want to: you ponder. What might it have been like if we kept dying? What might it have been like if we stopped dying earlier, or later? What might it have been like if we kept giving birth and aging without death?

When people still died, there was a saying—“the youth is wasted on the young.” It was true, then; humanity only gained the maturity enough to make use of their lives by the time their bodies had begun to fail. Children, no matter how quickly they grew up, could not fathom what was worth doing or what they should have been doing with their youth.

That saying is now, effectively, null and void. We are all part of an eternal youth, no matter how old we were when we stopped aging, for injury and risk of harm isn’t an issue anymore. We have all the potential to do everything we ever could, everything that youth is good for, and it’s really quite incredible what people do.

Or, I suppose, what people _do_ is not the incredible part. It’s what has become _worth_ doing that begets such awe.

With all the time we could possibly hope for, the value in doing insane thing after insane thing, making life exciting and violent, has diminished. Everyone should do something like that once in a while, of course; we all need to spice it up occasionally, and we never know how fulfilling something could be until we do it. But “worth” doesn’t just mean to go wild. “Worth” encompasses so much more now that we have infinity. 

“Worth” can mean sitting down to watch football game twenty-seven for an afternoon, even if nothing ever happens, and it doesn’t. “Worth” can be pouring years of your time into playing 500, and “worth” can be ignoring football entirely and bartending in Arkansas. “Worth” is subjective and youth is made for what is worth doing. 

In 2026 I was twenty-four and I had just graduated from college two years before and I knew nothing of the world, and what I wanted to do in it. I was an adult at the time but I was a child, too, and that was the year we stopped dying, and it scared me.

It still scares me. And it scares you. I know it does, because we’re children of the clock, and no matter how far back it was, we were born with the knowledge that one day the last grain of sand would fall in the hourglass. One day we wouldn’t have to keep going. To take that end date away is terrifying! To know that we have to figure out how to keep moving forward forever is scary!

We’ve learned how to live with infinity but that doesn’t mean it’s stopped burning us, every now and then. It sneaks up on you, the fear of forever, and the thing about immortality is that we always knew, objectively, that we’d be here forever but living it is different. So, so very different.

Maybe immortality was a miracle and maybe life at all was a miracle and maybe existence was the very first, but maybe it wasn’t. I think that perhaps none of this was miraculous, but instead inevitability. Inevitably molecules would come together and form rock, form planets, inevitably chemicals would bond and break apart and inevitably life would form. Inevitably it would finish growing and stay there.

Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe we’re finished, and we’re staying here.

Time is a construct, right? Technically you could say it never moves. Technically it doesn’t exist. Things change and grow, but time itself is only based on how fast light travels to us and how fast our brains can process that, and theoretically, if we tried, we could go forward or backward in time. So. Technically I could say that I won’t live forever, because forever doesn’t exist. I live right now. No more or less than that. I think that that’s comforting. I live right now, and I’m staying here, and it doesn’t matter when “now” comes to an end, if it ever will, because I’m right here. I’m living in what I’m doing right now. Right now I am writing an essay about time and forever and us, and this is all of infinity to me.

Does that make sense?

I’m losing my train of thought.

Okay.

Let’s try something different.

I was talking about inevitability a couple paragraphs up. Death… when death happened, death felt like an inevitability too. If you are born, inevitably you will die. Life ends at death. Life and death are intertwined; one does not come without the other.

Without death to balance it, is what we are experiencing actually life? Or is it something else? Something new?

My first and only experiences with death, up close and personal, were my aunt and my grandmother. My aunt passed away unexpectedly when I was really young. Six, maybe? I’m not sure. My grandmother passed when I was sixteen.

Both times, it didn’t really matter to me, in the way a death in the family seemed so monumental back then. My aunt I had seen maybe five or so times in my life, since she and my uncle lived across the country. My grandmother I’d seen plenty, but… well, we’ve never been the kind of family that sticks close. And I had my own issues that made me grow distant from most of my relatives. The point is that I didn’t know her well, and when she died, I felt almost nothing at all.

The thing about death is that it’s an end, but it also isn’t. Life (time?) continues on even after it, moving on to other things, and the thing about death is that the person dying is the only one for whom anything is ending at all. The end of death is more monumental than death itself, and something about that is striking, I think. Death doesn’t really matter. Death was an inevitability. Death coming to an end, death packing up and leaving? That was an end for all of us. An end to a way out, the sand in the hourglass stuck in the top.

No, wait.

No I don’t know where I’m going with this.

Okay, how about this: children. Kids. I touched on it earlier; the lack of children that now is. Some of us got stuck in awkward bodies—late teens, closer to the hundreds. Those of us in the extremes grew backward or forward to a point where our bodies could rest comfortably, but the vast majority got stuck where they were in 2026 until we figured out how to make ourselves look any age. Those of us who were kids then have been living for fifteen thousand years now. None of us can pretend to be children anymore, and that’s maybe a bad thing.

For all that I said about what it might be like to live from birth without an end date, I think the world withers without children in it. The thing about immortality is that as you get older, you get stuck in your thoughts and ways, and children used to be the ones who broke that mold. Kids would wander and skip and run in the places no one else’s feet would touch, and kids would challenge the way of things. Kids were… kids were fresh, new, exciting things. Beautiful things.

I think the world suffers without the excited babble of the tiny ones, and without the dumb rebellion of teens. I think we should have made room for a couple of cracked heads and incredulous headlines when we programmed the nanos. In a world unchanging, children were always meant to be the hairline cracks, I think, and eventually we were supposed to shatter into something new. And…

And, I think the thing about immortality is maybe it was never meant to happen.

Yes. Yes, I think this is where I’ve wanted to go, from the beginning.

The pressure of the clock, biologically, was always to spur us into procreation before our time ran out. It was all for the perpetuation of the species. It was meant to be weighing on our shoulders, and that pressure was what made us so sparking and vibrant, back before the 21st century proper. We were always supposed to be scared of the moment the last grain of sand falls, and it was always supposed to fall—there was always supposed to be a due date. Life begets death begets life, and there’s a reason growth verdant always springs from volcanic ash.

We as a species were meant to be fleeting, and our imprint on the world was meant to last, not us. We made such violent, enchanting art and technology and such decadent language and math for the posterity, not for us. Everything we did was for the future, but not our future, because death our end date was always coming up fast. Teenagers did dumb shit back then because when else would you do it? When else would you get the opportunity? And we needed to do it, we needed those scraped knees and cracked skulls, because that’s _life_ far more than eternity could be. Life is harsh and bleeding and life is not meant to last.

I’m saying I think something went wrong somewhere. I’m saying that the batteries ran out of juice in some cosmic clock, and the box is empty, and kids were always supposed to litter the world and we were always supposed to have war and famine and we were supposed to keep eating the planet alive because that’s what it meant to be one species of many. Life was always supposed to end in death, and we were always supposed to die.

The thing about immortality is that it was always supposed to be a thing of fiction, and now that we’re here, all we can do is know what it means:

forever. infinity. eons unimaginable. billions of football games that’ll span the whole planet and an eventual, imprecise, hopeful end of time itself that we might just live through.

and we have no choice.

**Author's Note:**

> hey! thanks for reading, if you did. 17776 isn't quite the fanfiction-heavy fandom, but i was rereading it and got inspired. this is a very VERY rough piece that i'm mostly posting because i want to! if you enjoy it, please leave a comment. i do appreciate each and every one.


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